Troubleshoot: Quadcopter Flips Over Taking Off

It’s frustrating, but not uncommon that quadcopter flips over when trying to take off. Usually, the issue is due to wrong configuration or faulty parts. In this guide I will help you troubleshoot the problem.

If you followed my mini quad building and setup guide, you should have eliminated many potential causes that ruin your first take off. It’s not too late to check it out 🙂 You might still learn something.

Now, let’s get back to work!

A motor with loose propeller generates little to no lift. Make sure all the prop nuts are fastened tightly, and that the props are unable to move when holding down the motor.

Check spin direction of the motors, and make sure they match the arrows in the this diagram on the motor tab.

Pro tip: What’s the easiest way to physically figure out which way the motors are turning without props on?

Simply touch the motor bell lightly when it’s spinning, and letting your finger drag across the bell. You can tell which way the motor is turning as you should feel more resistance if the bell is spinning the opposite direction.

If the motors are all spinning the opposite direction, you can simply toggle the option “Reverse Motor” in the Configuration tab in Betaflight Configurator.

If a motor screw is too long and touching the motor windings, it basically creates an electrical short in the motor. It might appear to spin up just fine when you arm it, but the quad could just flip over immediately when trying to get it off the ground.

If you leave it running like this long enough, the motor might overheat, and eventually fry the motor and ESC.

You will need Accelerometer to check your flight controller orientation, so please enable Accelerometer in the Configuration Tab first.

Then go to the Setup Tab, where you should see a 3D model of a quadcopter, representing your quad.

As you move your quad around, the 3D model should follow the movement. Make sure it rotates in the exact same direction. If not, it’s probably the wrong flight controller orientation.

You can either rotate your flight controller manually in the quadcopter, or you can change the “board alignment” setting in Betaflight.

Go to the Configuration tab, under “Board and Sensor Alignment”, and change Yaw degrees. If you don’t know what to change it to, just try 0, 90, 180 and 270, one of these values should normally work.

Turtle mode (aka “Flip over after crash”) is a very useful feature. It flips over your quad when you are downed and overturned. But when you have Turtle mode enabled by accident, you might have trouble taking off.

If your quad does not respond to throttle changes, but simply flips out when you touch pitch or roll, this is probably it. If you have Betaflight OSD enabled and showing “warning”, you should see “CRASH FLIP” in your OSD to confirm this.

If you are not sure, try Standard PWM which is supported in all ESC’s. This will allow you to rule out whether it’s a protocol related issue.

You can change ESC protocol in the Configuration tab.

You can forget about ESC calibration if you are running DShot. But if you are not, then you should calibrate your ESC’s.

If one or multiple ESC’s in your quadcopter are not calibrated properly, they could have an later starting point than others. Usually it can cause some performance issues, not as bad as making the quad to flip out at takeoff, but it’s worth checking.

In the Configuration tab, you should see an option called “Mixer”. It basically chooses which motors to run, and changes the percentage of throttle applied to each motor. You only want to play with this when you run an unusual frame or motor configuration.

For a normal quadcopter, you should just leave it at default – “Quad X”.

Go to the Receiver tab, and make sure the bars are moving in the correct order to your stick inputs. Note that some flight controllers might require LiPo battery plugged in, in order to power up the receiver.

If the channel order is wrong, simply try a different “channel map” – it’s usually either TEAR (Default) or AETR for most people.

And also make sure the bars are moving in the correct direction:

Throttle value increases as you move throttle stick up

Yaw value increases as you move yaw stick right

Pitch value increases as you move pitch stick up

Roll value increases as you move roll stick right

If they move in the opposite direction, you can revert that channel in your radio setting. The steps depend on what radio you use, so better to just google how to do it 🙂

Acro mode only uses the Gyro and doesn’t use Accelerometer, while Angle and Horizon modes use both sensors.

An un-calibrated or broken Accelerometer can cause the flight controller to “freak out” when you are trying to take off in Angle mode or Horizon mode. So please try to take off in Acro mode and see what happens.

Maybe there are wrong settings in Betaflight causing your problem, and it’s not a bad idea to start fresh by wiping the entire configuration. There is a “Reset Settings” button in the Setup tab in Betaflight Configurator. You might want to backup your settings first just in case.

Also I would recommend updating your firmware to the latest stable version to take advantage of the most recent bug fixes.